Flu cases rise again while Covid occupies a backput – public radio in South Carolina

Currently, many people feel disgusting as the winter stew of breathing viruses boils. But there are some unusual trends that move the entire cough, sneezing and fever this year.

First, the good news: this winter overvoltage of Covid-19 was light.

“This year, the winter wave is low compared to previous winters,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Jones Hopkins Bloomberg School for Public Health. “This is the smallest winter wave we have had since the beginning of the pandemic.”

The weekly rate with which people are hospitalized for Covid this winter reached the largest of about 4 in 100,000, compared to about 8 per 100,000 last season, about 11 per 100,000 in the 2022-2023 season and 35 to 100,000 in the 2021-2022 season, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One of the possible explanations for the relatively soft winter for Covid is that the United States has experienced an unusually intense summer wave, which also started relatively late. As a result, many people can still have some immunity from the time they had forge in the summer.

“There are fewer people available to get infected because they have had a recent impetus to immunity,” Rivers says.

The flu can push Covid

At the same time, a new variant has not developed, which is better in circumventing the immunity that people have accumulated, according to Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Another possible factor is “viral intervention,” she says. This is a phenomenon that occurs when the presence of a virus pushes other viruses. Some scientists believe that this may be one of the reasons why there is a decrease in infections with other respiratory viruses, such as influenza and RSV, during early, heavy waves.

“Viral intervention may play a role this year,” Gordon says. “There is a lot of influenza circulating. This can generate some non-specific immunity-some nonspecific protection, which does not allow people to get other respiratory infections, such as Sars-Cov-2-something by pushing it.”

This said that Covid is still spreading wide, causing people to miss work, children miss school, and even make some people so sick that they find themselves in the hospital or die. Thus, Rivers says that people do not have to take off their guards, especially because taking steps to protect against a blacksmith can also be protected from other viruses, such as RSV and flu.

Flu recovers and can stick

The trend of bad news this year is the flu. This year, the flu season began unusually early and spread to high levels across the country. And now it seems that the United States is experiencing a second peak in the flu this winter.

“The influenza activity first reached the end of the New Year – at the end of December, early January. The activity then decreases for a few weeks in a row, which is usually a sign that the season is on the road,” Rivers says. “But then it really took an unusual twist and started to rise again. So the activity is now on the second peak – just as high as it was at the beginning of the new year. It’s unusual.”

The speed at which people go to a doctor for fever and cough or sore throat, which is one of the ways CDC to track the flu, dropped from 6.8%to 5.4%, but then began to increase, reaching 7%, According to the rivers.

So the intensity of this year’s flu season can have a long tail, she says. “This can be an unusually severe flu season,” Rivers says.

The reason for the second peak remains unclear. So far, testing has not noticed any signs that the H5N1 influenza virus, which spreads to poultry and dairy cows, spreads widely in humans, contributing to the second peak.

So the cause remains a mystery, Rivers says. This may simply be the kind of natural variation that happens to the flu.

Still, the more people catch the flu, the greater the chances of people infect with both viruses – regular influenza and bird flu. And this can allow bird flu to exchange genes with regular flu and become something more dangerous.

“This is certainly a great concern,” Gordon says. “The danger of influenza is that we have so many people who are infected with these seasonal viruses that this can increase the chance of getting co-infection in a person with one of these seasonal viruses and H5N1, which allows you to generate a new virus , who transmits really well from man to man.

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